'Beautiful heat'

Japanese salsa reflects influences unique to Colorado

Jason Takaki, left, and Kei Izawa show their product, Karami Japanese Salsa, at Miller's Grille in Lafayette, where it is featured in a barbequed pork sandwich, the Hawkeye. (Courtesy photo)

The family of Jason Takaki emigrated from Japan and began farming near Pueblo around 1910. (Courtesy photo)

It was Christmastime in 2012 when Jason Takaki decided to take the five pounds of peppers he had in the freezer and cook up a big batch of the green chile for gifts.

For Takaki, a fourth-generation Coloradan, the chile was a natural, since he'd grown up in Pueblo where green chile rules. As he got ready to cook, though, he thought of another green chile that spoke to his heritage — a sauce that was once ubiquitous in the Japanese community in those parts, a group of immigrants who settled in Colorado at the turn of the last century to farm in the San Luis Valley, as well as farther north.

The sauce was a clever adaptation for immigrants so far away from their own country and the ingredients that were a staple of their diet. It was a type of tsukudani, a dish in which various ingredients are simmered in soy sauce. A common tsukudani is made witht the seaweed kombu, which is left over after making the Japanese broth called dashi. The soy-flavored seaweed is often served over rice as a flavorful condiment. But Takaki's ancestors, like other Japanese immigrants in landlocked Colorado had no access to seaweed. So they turned to a local product that was local, plentiful and cheap: green chiles.

These peppers were combined with soy sauce and sugar to produce a condiment that resembled the seaweed in appearance and texture, if not in flavor. It had a kick to it, as anyone who has ever broken a sweat over a bowl of the green stuff knows.

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Every family had its own version, Takaki says. Some were thick and spreadable with a knife. Others were more soupy. His family's was chunky. After calling his sister to confirm the basic ratios, he set to work and bottled up his sauce to take to friends.

One of those was also his business associate, Kei Izawa. He and Takaki, a lawyer in Denver, had created a company that shipped agave to Japan, opening the market for the sweetener there. They had decided they wanted to develop a food product for the U.S. market, but they couldn't come up with the right concept.

They considered a teriyaki sauce sweetened with agave but decided it was too hard to differentiate a teriyaki sauce. A sesame oil-based salad dressing, which they also considered, had the same problem.

"(We wanted) to come up with something totally unique. We didn't see it," says Kei, who was raised in South America, and educated in Japan and the United States. Kei, who had been an executive at General Motors, came to Boulder seeking a more balanced life with less stress. He now writes in Japanese for various publications on health and sustainability, as well as pursuing his business ventures.

The Hawkeye sandwich, with barbecued pork. candied bacon and Karami salsa is the top seller at Miller's Grille in Lafayette. (Courtesy photo)

While Takaki might have connected the dots on some subconscious level as he stirred the family sauce, he wasn't thinking about their business dilemma when he gave Izawa the bottle filled with the soy sauce and green chile that meant so much to Takaki's ancestors.

Izawa, however, saw the potential.

"He brings it. It looked very nice," he says. "My wife and I finished the jar.

"I said, 'Jason, this is it!' "

The two went to work on the product. With their experience in agave, they decided to tweak the recipe to use agave rather than sugar. Similarly, Izawa, with his connection to health and sustainability issues, suggested that they make the sauce gluten free by using a wheat-free tamari, get it non-GMO certified and use organic and natural ingredients.

But as many food entrepreneurs have discovered, the journey from idea to product on the grocer's shelf often contains some obstacles. The first problem was that the recipe was difficult to scale up, partly due to inconsistencies with the chiles themselves. They began working with a small Colorado Springs co-packer, and Takaki also spent about a month tasting the many iterations of the sauce, looking to capture the essence of the condiment that generations of his family had used to flavor their rice.

They also worked on the label and came up with the name Karami, which is a combination of the words karei, which means spicy or hot and mi, which means beautiful.

Beatiful heat.

However, they still weren't sure exactly what the product was. A condiment like mustard or ketchup? Maybe a sauce?

It was the co-packer who nailed that down.

"It's a salsa," he told them.

In the beginning, they toyed with making a hot and mild version, but reducing the heat emphasized the sweet, making the sauce "cloying," according to Izawa. So, they opted to stick with the hot version.

However, it's not like a hot green chile that makes steam come out of your ears, at least metaphorically.

Instead, the flavor profile is nuanced, Takaki says.

He describes the taste experience like this:

"You're starting with the sweet, then a little saltiness from the tamari. Then there's a great kick on the back end from the green chile."

The salsa's versatility is evidenced by two local menus on which it makes an appearance. It garnishes a roll at Sushi Zanmai in Boulder that's made with yellowtail, avocado and mango.

"It's really good. We could almost just sell it on a bowl of rice," says Kyosuke Yamazaki, one of the restaurant's sushi chefs.

The salsa also adorns a barbecued pork and candied bacon sandwich at Miller's Grille in Lafayette.

Rich Womack, who took over the place two years ago and in September converted it to a barbecue, burger and beer place, began putting it on his pulled pork sandwich, the Hawkeye, after his pit master sang its praises.

"It's very smooth," he says. "The sweetness in it rounds out the green chile."

Then there's the soy, which adds more flavor, he says.

In addition to the restaurant venues, the salsa is available at Alfalfa's and Lucky's markets

When Takaki and Izawa approached Alfalfa's Market about carrying the product, store director Dale Kamibayashi was on board right away.

"I really liked the way it was put together," he says. "The (flavor) profile of the heat, the sweet and how adaptable it was to different applications. We even use it in the prepared foods area in various dishes."

Kamibayashi, whose family is also descended farmers who emigrated from Japan, liked the story of the product, too.

"How Japanese-Americans really adapted to the resources available," he says. Kamibayashi has a darker story of adaptation from the history of his own family, who were interned in World War II, as was Takaki's family on his mother's side.

Growing up, Kamibayashi wondered why his family ate cut-up hot dogs sauteed in teriyaki sauce. He came to find out that it was because his family was given hot dogs and Spam to eat at the internment camp. Kamibayashi's dad, who enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in World War II and served on the front lines in Italy with the all-Japanese 442nd Infantry, had developed a taste for the way his mother added a Japanese twist to the cheap meats. Takaki's grandfather also served in Europe with General George Patton's Third Army.

Tataki and Izawa plan to let their company grow slowly so they can keep strict control of the salsa's quality.

Izawa describes its flavor as being full of umami, the so-called fifth taste recognized in Japan as a flavor that is round, savory and complete.

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